“You need to get back on a horse again, Earlene. You’re not afraid of horses, I see that now. And you and Captain Wentworth have a mutual fan club. He’s definitely ready to ride again, but needs an experienced rider. I think he’s just been waiting for you.”
I struggled with warring emotions, remembering what Helen had told me, about how Tucker had once dug up a grave looking for pirate treasure, and I thought I saw a glimmer of that boy now. He was a doctor by profession, in search of healing others, yet unable or unwilling to see that his own wounds remained unbandaged.
I shook my head, not even sure if I understood my reluctance enough to explain it to someone else. Or maybe I was just too ashamed of the real reason I suspected I couldn’t do it. I felt my anger at myself and quickly turned it on him. “Stop pressuring me. I’m in a lot of pain with my back and my knee, which precludes my riding. I have pins holding my knee and leg together, if that draws a clearer picture for you.”
He didn’t look away, and his eyes reminded me of Helen’s and her ability to see behind the words, and I knew I hadn’t fooled him at all. “I’m a doctor. I know about these things. I also know that there are exercises you can do to strengthen muscles to lessen the pain and increase your flexibility. Emily can probably help you, if you just ask.”
I stood, wondering if there was a mass conspiracy going on. “I’ve heard, thank you. I tried exercises in the beginning and they didn’t help. But if it will get everybody off of my back, then I will, okay? But I’m never getting back on a horse. Not ever, so you can stop asking.”
He stood, too, and smiled a brilliant smile, surprising me. “We’ll see. In the meantime, I’ll tell Lucy that she’ll have to wait to ride Captain Wentworth until after you’ve broken him in. That was her idea, by the way, and not mine.”
The image of Lucy negotiating to ride Captain Wentworth made me want to laugh, but I managed an inelegant snort instead.
“My Lucy has a sense of humor.”
My Lucy.
I wondered if he was aware he’d said that. “She comes by it honestly at least,” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“Your name’s William Tecumseh Gibbons. Obviously, somebody in your family would have to have a sense of humor to name you after the Yankee general most Savannah residents still refer to as Satan. It’s sort of like naming the British heir apparent ‘Napoleon’ or something.”
He pulled out a few tall blades of grass and pressed them between his fingers. “My mother named me. I don’t know if it was because she had a sense of humor or because she wanted to piss off my grandmother. Not that it mattered. My grandmother called me Tucker the first time she saw me and that’s what it’s been ever since.”
He turned his gaze to me again. “My wife—Susan—called me William. She thought that using a nickname was a sort of deception. As if it gave me license to pretend to be someone else.”
I tasted the roof of my mouth, my tongue suddenly too thick to speak. I wanted to tell him then who I was, but I thought about how I’d told him about my Olympic dreams and how he hadn’t laughed, and how he’d stayed with his daughters the night under the oaks when I’d told him he should be with them. I liked William Tecumseh Gibbons, and I liked that his nickname was Tucker and I knew that whatever relationship we’d forged over the last month would be over the minute he learned that I was Piper Mills and that I’d been lying to him from the first moment we met.
I knew I should probably steer the conversation in another direction, but I couldn’t help myself. I couldn’t forget the grave that rested in unconsecrated ground outside of the family cemetery, or not be curious about the mother who’d abandoned Lucy and Sara. “How did you introduce yourself to her when you first met?”
He didn’t answer right away. “I didn’t, actually. She was a . . . patient of my medical school mentor, a psychiatrist. He’s actually my partner now. But I met her in his office.”
I looked at him in surprise. “She was his patient?”
“I didn’t know at the time—patient confidentiality and all that—but she was seeing him for several things, mostly severe depression and a substance-abuse problem she’d struggled with since adolescence. She’d been in and out of rehab since she was a teenager, trying to cope with the fallout from a dysfunctional childhood. She was responding well to therapy, so when I met her, I didn’t . . .” He closed his mouth, seeming to struggle between loyalty and honesty. “I didn’t realize how emotionally unstable she was until we got engaged during my second year of medical school.”
“And you didn’t break it off?”
He looked away. “She found out she was pregnant and wanted the baby. I couldn’t let her have the baby on her own. It was my child, too. And at least if I were with her, I could keep her healthy if not for her sake, then for the baby’s.”
“Lucy?”
He nodded.
I was silent for a moment. “How did she handle motherhood?”
“After Lucy was born, she went back on her antidepressants. She seemed to be herself again, and I thought we could still make a go out of our marriage now that we were parents.”
“But that didn’t happen.”
Tucker shook his head. “Susan became more and more dependent on me, almost as if I were a substitute for her drugs. And if I didn’t give her the attention she needed, she’d stay in her room for days until I could find a way to get her to forgive me.” He flattened his hands against the garden wall, studying his callused fingers. “I knew she had serious issues dating back to her childhood. The details she gave me were sketchy, but enough for me to agree with her choice to cut off all contact with her family. But there were demons she fought every day. Shortly after Lucy was born, Susan started stealing prescription drugs from my medical office. We didn’t notice at first because she was just taking samples, but we eventually caught on and I knew immediately who it was. She went to rehab—again—and it seemed to help.”
His eyes held the haunted look I remembered from the first time I’d seen him, and I wanted to look away. “So things got better then?”
“For a while. But then she got pregnant with Sara. I shouldn’t have allowed that to happen. . . .” He shrugged. “And it was different this time after Sara. Her old antidepressants weren’t working and it took us a while to find one that did. When Sara was three, I took a leave of absence from my practice and moved us to Asphodel in the hopes that a change of scenery would help, and to get her away from her drug sources. She was too busy self-medicating for us to figure out something that might help, and taking her away was pretty much a last resort.”
He smoothed the dark hair from his forehead with both hands. “Then I thought we had the answer to all of our prayers when Susan got on this genealogy kick and seemed to have found a purpose for her life. Maybe she was pretending that the lives she was discovering were her own, in some warped way of erasing her own past. I didn’t bother to analyze it. She was happy and excited for the first time since we got married. And then it sort of . . . fell apart about a year and a half ago.”
“What happened?” I asked, watching as he stooped to pick up another handful of grass before disintegrating the blades between his fingers.
“I’m not really sure. She’d been after Malily to give her access to all of her papers. Malily told her that some things were meant to remain private, but that didn’t stop Susan. She apparently went snooping in Malily’s room when my grandmother was out of town at a horse event, and found something. I believe Malily discovered it was missing and got it back because I never found out what it was. But it was enough to send Susan into a tailspin.”
“Did you ever ask Malily what it was?”
“Yes, and she told me it was just a letter she’d written to a friend but never sent. But that with Susan’s mind being the way it was, she read things into it. Malily thought that Susan had somehow become so absorbed in my grandmother’s story that she was sort of reliving it—the good and the bad. Maybe there were parts that reminded Susan of her own childhood.” He dropped the shredded grass back to the ground. “I guess I’ll never know for sure. She drowned herself a week later. She simply . . . walked into the river. I’ve never been able to figure that one out. We had the pond here, after all. But she chose the river.”
A letter to a friend.
The words hung in the air between us, and I had to keep myself from asking more.
He looked at me, as if just now realizing I was there. “I’m sorry. I don’t know why I’m telling you all this.”
I thought for a moment, realizing how since my accident even strangers on park benches or in grocery store lines seemed to want to confide in me. I almost smiled, the reason why so clear to me now. “Don’t worry. It happens a lot. I think it’s because people see that I’m damaged, so they think I’ll understand their problems more than their spouses or friends. Like I have an inside track to figuring out problems because mine are undoubtedly greater than theirs.”
He regarded me and I could see him struggling with the correct response. “It doesn’t have to be that way, you know. Maybe you’re using your injury as an excuse. As long as your knee is stiff and painful, you have a reason for not trying. You don’t have to jump again, Earlene. Nobody’s asking you to. But wouldn’t it be nice to ride again—just for fun?”
I almost told him then that I was Piper Mills and that it had never occurred to me to just simply ride for fun. I was a competitor. I wasn’t a mountain climber who climbed a mountain just because it was there. I rode horses because I was good at it, because at one time I’d had a shot at being the best at it. I rode because there was something inside of me that wanted to be something other than ordinary.
Instead, I looked up at the copper and green magnolia leaves, how still they were as they waited for the next breeze to move them. “And because you’re a doctor you think it’s your job to heal everyone. But not everyone needs or wants healing, you know.”
I felt him watching me and I wanted to look into his marsh green eyes because I could always see a pain there that matched my own, but I didn’t. Because every time I did look at him I felt something else, too, something I wasn’t ready to explore. Two damaged people did not make a whole.
“Everyone needs healing,” he said softly.
Without waiting for me to respond, he said,“Before I forget, I think I found the necklace you were looking for.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out my angel charm, the chain dangling from his hand like an unanswered question. “It’s odd, because Malily has one identical to it—so much so that I would have thought it was hers if I hadn’t seen her wearing it right before I found this on the garden path.”
The words sprang to my lips before I could pull them back. “I think angel charms were like mood rings to our grandmothers’ generation. A lot of women their age probably had one.”
“With the same inscription?” He pulled his eyebrows together in question.
“Yeah. Latin must have been the ‘in’ thing back then.”
“Must have been,” he said, smiling, making me feel worse. “I hope you don’t mind, but I fixed the chain.”
“Thank you,” I managed, and before I could say anything else, he’d placed the necklace around my neck, fastening the chain while I held up my hair. Our eyes met, and I knew that if I didn’t speak up now, I’d have no defense later when the truth inevitably found its way to the surface.
“I need to tell you something. . . .”
My words were cut short by the appearance of Lucy, who came running around the corner of the garden wall. She was dressed and ready for her riding lesson, holding the fluorescent purple crop I’d purchased for her on a whim at a local tack shop. “Where’s Sara? We’re supposed to have our lesson now, but she’s not in her room and she’s not at the ring, either. And her riding clothes are still on her bed. I don’t want us to be late because then my lesson will be shorter.”
“Where did you see her last?” Tucker asked, his voice firm but gentle.
“In the kitchen with Odella. Odella was making us pimento cheese sandwiches because that’s Sara’s favorite. And then we were supposed to go upstairs to get changed out of our swimsuits. I left first because Sara’s a slowpoke and hadn’t finished hers yet.”
“Did you look in the kitchen?”
Lucy shook her head. “No, because she was supposed to be done.”
As if an afterthought, Tucker gently tugged on one of her braided and bowed pigtails, causing Lucy to lean toward him. “She’s probably still in there, listening to some long-winded story of Odella’s. I’ll go find her and hurry her up. Meanwhile, you and Miss Earlene can get started with your lesson.”
I watched as he walked away, swallowing my confession until I could find him alone again. I turned to Lucy. “We’re going to work on a couple of new things while we’re waiting for Sara. I’m going to teach you something today called ‘two-point’—do you know what that is?”
Lucy nodded eagerly. “It’s to learn how to jump, isn’t it?”
“Not necessarily,” I said cautiously. “It will strengthen your quads—those are your thigh muscles—and teach you proper positioning, which you need for all riding, including jumping.”
“Oh.” She sounded disappointed. “And then how much longer before I’m jumping?” Her dark brown eyes looked up at me eagerly. “I think Daddy wants me to be a really good jumper.”
I stopped walking and squatted in front of her. “Lucy, if you want to be a good jumper, you have to want to do it—nobody else. It’s always great to have somebody you love supporting you in the sidelines. But when it’s just you, your horse, and a five-foot jump, there’s no room for anybody else, okay?”
Her eyes darkened, her face serious. “I want to be the best. It’s been my dream since I was really small. Mama told me that dreams were just food for heartache, but I didn’t believe her. I didn’t say so, though. She didn’t take very well to anybody disagreeing with her, but I let her think that she was right. And I never stopped dreaming.”